Thus Always to Tyrants: On Teachers necessarily crafting a well made space for our young, and ourselves, this school year anew
As I begin year 2, my 2nd chop at this lumber, this next effort in engaging our children, emerging adults, around the concepts of psychology, teaching them, learning with them, I realize that I have not reflected well and long enough on the process, though I have meditated on it, plenty.
And maybe a function of the craft, of thinking and knowing of oneself as a teacher, a mwalimu, is to forge ahead without giving very much air to the wishes and needs and fantasies of the teaching spirit. They will always find their way up and out, however. They will call to that same spirit in others, demanding a shared space, and an unburdening, and a reframing, all of it, with all of those others, who live and know this work.
I found, during that first year, that I needed to draw on all of my experience and training and skill, bringing the whole Psychologist, trauma specialist, therapist, administrator, and still found that my students, and our classrooms and lecture halls and office hours, required something more, perhaps something different, but no less essential.
Upon taking time this Summer, traveling, meditating, preparing, staging, scheming, I developed a bit of a tool belt for myself, for others, for those who may need, when they, and we, may need, for living with our children in our shared learning spaces. What I had to acknowledge in assembling the following, is that our children are always prepared to teach, if we are prepared to provide them with a space and ready will to learn.
I fear, gravely, what the narrative of our various classroom spaces does for the development of our children. I fear that in spaces made for learning, we are failing to engage our children in emotional literacy practices. While we may confront their anger, or isolation, or anxiety, we are often not crafting a space for them to necessarily draw out their doubt, shattered esteem, personal fear and belief about their generational curses. I fear that we are prioritizing the ledges on which we feel most secure as educators, and leaving them otherwise to fend for themselves, hoping.
Our brilliant young, especially those Black and Brown and rare, and limitless, are often being made tribute to the many failings of our classroom system. Their personal narrative, often painted upon every developmental surface in their spaces, is one suggesting to them that there is only so much that they are personally capable of, them, and everyone very like them.
At some point, now, we must press our various teaching, schooling and developmental systems about the essential importance of emotional literacy for our children. We must guide them in practices which allow them to feel and believe and know out, as a means of staving off what we conveniently refer to as “acting out”, and have seen fit to punish. We can guide them, through brief meditation to breathe in, first in the morning, and to let that breath search, and collect the worry and angst, and shame and guilt, and to breathe it out. We can guide them toward progressively activating and relaxing muscles, crafting affirmative narratives in their own voices, accepting the flawed whole self, and on, and over. We can, and must, begin and close the day in our learning spaces with our young being allowed and able to spend time with themselves, becoming personally and emotionally literate, and sharing that in a space with others. As is, we make our classrooms, very often, harsh distractions. More holding pen than growth and staging area. There is a healthier, freer narrative for us to guide these young toward, and we must enter into these depths out front, encouraging, and urgent, with our children.
I was wounded early, and often, and recall struggling with the understanding myself, that there is a very fixed identity set around the concept of “student.” It stayed with me that there is a fixed and brutal reality around the concept, and only limited space made for those who best represent the concept. Much of what I have resolved to spend time with my classmates on is seeing how emotional narrative, and supremacy, and cruelty, and prejudice, have made a golem of the concept, and set it to the task of further wounding, irreversibly, the vulnerable. There is no one “student.” There is no one born with the gift to be such, or destined to be the ideal representation of the concept. The whole concept as we know it, myth. I will ask them to see themselves as researcher, and thinker, and learner and teacher, and sharer and writer, a being developing in all of these ways, and so by necessity, a student, free of the hand and grip of the narrative which reduces and distances them their best self. Our classroom, and its narrative space, must be ready to free them, ready for the mess this will make, and allow them to freely construct the new self and the new narrative.
Another thing which struck me in my meditation on the craft of teaching was the demand that we make of so many Black and Brown young that they leave so much of themselves behind if they wish to succeed in the classroom space, and be allowed entry into the common room shared by their nation family. We, through our critique and policy and language and practice, suggest to them that their dress, and way of thinking, and privilege of youth, so-called, and refusal to submit to our quality control, is some marker of the failure awaiting them. We make these cuts deepest, and gaslight them toward believing these wounds are self inflicted. Better that our classrooms serve as the laboratories that their homes and communities so often are. Better that we demonstrate the frantic willingness to welcome their whole person, and their personhood, into our shared learning spaces.
Better that we use hip-hop as a guide toward understanding them, and making our learning concepts real in their lives. Better that we allow them to teach us how they are coming to understand their lived experience, and use that to shape and ground all of our shared learning concepts. Better that we make them experts on their unique human, allow them to write their personal psychology, and note their history, and provide them with the learning space to be the teacher for a time. Our children, our young, our classmates require that they be given agency in our shared learning space, and that we meet them and learn their patois. Who are we to refuse them if the goal is to raise them as a learner and to hone our craft as teacher?
And as we are learning and teaching emotional and personal literacy, and the power of narrative, and deconstructing and reframing narrative, we should build a shared language for our students, which essentially promotes their wellness and wholeness into the learning and living space. We should be thinking of our children as our classmates, as we are in the learning space with them. We should begin the practice of knowing, and saying, and projecting, toward them that the classroom is their space as well, and each should build themselves into it. We should find texts and activities to tie to the required leaning objectives, representative of our children, especially those subject to identity erasure. We should ask them to bring us their new classics in the arts, those most meaningful to them. We should always inquire of their beliefs and examine with them how these grow and change.
I would suggest to you that you too must be a learner in this process. You must develop your own emotional literacy, mwalimu. You must meditate on your wellness, and see the expectations of others and how these color your narrative, and study how a society refuses to value your craft and the role that you play in the lives of your young, and how that voice often selfishly demands that you must be a hero and fixer, when really those children, our young, require that you be a neighbor, and a partner, and witness to their becoming. I would suggest that you too, breath in, and find the wounds, and witness them, and breath them out, and that you begin to craft your best self, teacher, and make it a goal, and a fiction, and be the self that your children, our children, need. I would ask that you use imagery to paint eh landscape that your classmates require, and then begin to build it with them, and that you allow yourself the opportunity to fail in it, and try again, always, as the next doing is what your children need, and that you allow your true personhood to be witnessed by those vulnerable, powerful young, and that you meditate on all of the ways in which you can allow them to teach and grow you, and how your shared learning space can be the drawing board upon which they make the new and next realities, and become future.
I wish for you to live and learn and work emotional literacy into those sacred learning spaces. I wish you well, and hope you can meditate and send that same energy to me and my classmates, in return.
Go make a good year.
